Jean Baptiste Oudry: Painter to the Hunt of Louis XV
R.B. Fountain introduces an influential French artist of wild animals and the chase.
In the early eighteenth century John Wootton, Peter Tilliemans and James Seymour started the school of English Sporting Art that was to flourish so abundantly in the next two hundred years. What could have been the start of a similar movement in France was initiated by Francois Desportes (1661-1743) and J.B. Oudry (1686-1755).
In both England and France the tradition of pictures of the chase and of wild animals originated from seventeenth-century Flemish painters such as Jan Breughel and Rubens. Their theme was taken up and modified in several different ways; Cuyp and Potter developing the pastoral aspects, birds and still life being favoured by de Hondekoeter and Jan Weenix, while Franz Snyders and Jan Fyt often concentrated on the more dramatic aspects of the hunt and wild life.
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